StarWest Day 1: Team Culture and Test Automation

It was a great, fun-packed day at StarWest 2013. There was a lot to take away and a lot to argue about, which is always my favorite part of getting together with the rest of the testing community. My biggest takeaways were the unfortunate stigmas about test automation and how company culture correlates with the health of a product life cycle.

Check out the video below to hear my recap of day one at StarWest 2013 and let me know what you think about the event and the topics covered so far.

Comments

Nice summary; wish I could have made it. I like your assessment of R&P; very similar to min. R&P is not the problem; the misrepresentation or incorrect expectations of what R&P actually provides are the real culprits.

I agree with your points on r&p. We have found r&p combined with some internally developed utilities to be a very productive method of testing. We tried scripting everything but found the time investment to be greater than r &p. We now use r&p solely for new tests. Also agree that if you know how to use the tool, maintaining r&p tests is fairly trivial.

I want to add that I think there is a lot of negativity towards what test automation’s expectations and with this feature in general since some testers see it as an inappropriate way to negate a testers job. Of course this is not the purpose. It should be seen as a way to support a tester’s job and increase efficiency, nothing more than that.

I’ve heard stories about project managers or executives using test automation as a way to eliminate jobs, but that is solely based on poor judgment and I hope that they see in the future that isn’t and never will be the case. Someone needs to manage those test cases and many automated tests are just dead weight that actually don’t even test anything.

If you create an automated test and it passes on the first test run, is that really a good test? More times than not, a test that always passes doesn’t answer any questions about the product and its functionality. Tests are meant to fail.